


With Valor

by ahimsabitches



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Gen, REDEMPTION ARC!!!, There I Fixed It, angor deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 10:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16679482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."





	With Valor

Greetings and decanters of glug and wine duly exchanged, the reunion began in earnest beneath the warm amber glow of the heartstone. Even the humans: Toby, Claire, her family, Barbara, felt its power resting pleasantly on their skin and infusing them with grateful peace.

Blinky, as Elder of New Trollmarket, had claimed the largest dwelling for himself, and its main room was plenty big enough to accommodate everyone. He, Aaarrrggghh, Dredda, Jim, and Claire had spent the better part of the last year converting the Merlin-shrine into a home symbolic of the hard-won hope they carried and the future they wanted to pull from the wreckage of Arcadia.

“To a new future,” Blinky proclaimed, raising his cup of glug. “A future where all people-- troll, human, changeling, and any other who wishes-- can help each other, be stronger together, and face their oncoming destinies with valor.”

They all sent up a hearty cheer, troll clinking cups with human, human with changeling, changeling with troll. All smiles, except one.

_So,_ Angor thought to himself, his back against the wall furthest from the heartstone and his glug undrunk,  _why did they bring me?_

The party orbited around him, a dark, done-in sun. Blinky approached him once and beckoned him into a conversation between him and the Trollhunter's human mate and the brute he'd knifed with Creeper's Sun, but he growled and stepped forward, bearing down on the shorter troll. “Aren't you worried I have a Creeper's Sun dagger hidden on me and I'll take vengeance on my lost eye by _stabbing out_ five of yours?”

Blinky retreated, more of pity on his face and less of fear than Angor would have liked. He snarled at nobody in particular and downed his glug in one gulp. He still had _both_ his ears, so he'd heard every word that had passed between the brute-troll and the fleshbag Toby, back in Arcadia.

“Why _should_ we invite him to the reunion?” Toby had asked. He and the brute-troll had been raking debris from the front lawn of the house that Toby and his old fleshbag relative were to take once it was repaired. Angor had been enchanting more golems to help with the heavy lifting, since the town apparently needed more forklifts and backhoes than the surrounding three counties could supply, according to the Nunez fleshbag. “I mean, technically, does using golems and magic and stuff to help clean up even really _count?_ I feel like it's cheating. He gets to just go about his business while I feel like my arms are going to fall off every night.”

The fleshbag had thought himself furtive, but Angor heard his pitiful attempt at whispering from across the yard. The brute-troll was more subtle; he couldn't quite catch his rumbled half-words. But he did catch one that sent an arrow-quick pang through him: “sacrifice”.

Stricklander, by the malevolent yellow glare in his eyes, shared the fleshbag's opinion, or near enough to it to put Angor's chance—which he didn't even want anyway-- in jeopardy. But in the end, nobility or idiocy had won out and he had been _dragged_ across the country. For two weeks. In a motorcar caravan transporting six humans, a changeling, and one very large troll.

Dragged, through too many close calls with sunrises and sunsets, through the uncertain glances of the fleshbags and the watchful rancor of the changeling he still very much wanted to see impaled on a poisoned spike, and through the old-moss-old-stone reek of the brute-troll, to this foolish, superficial gathering, meant to be a gesture of inclusion, of brotherhood.

Of something he would never have again.

Dredda's ears caught the sharp sound of stone shattering on stone. She turned in time to see the tail of Angor's loincloth flit out of the room. “'Scuse me for a sec, Barbara?” She smiled at Jim's mother and went to the place by Blinky's apothecary where the fragments of Angor's cup had landed. Scooping them up, she crossed to the glug bowl and filled two new cups. She followed his peaty, dark, rainforesty scent out of their dwelling, through the thronged alleys of their new Trollmarket, and up, out into the crisp night.

Despite New Jersey being a shithole of a caliber for which she had not been prepared, California had made her miss winter. She filled her lungs with snow-heavy air, closed her eyes, and let the moonlight smooth itself onto her face. For once, it outshone the horrible orange glare of the arc-sodium streetlights.

Angor's scent trail led her to a narrow, soggy alley between two great shoulders of brick. She found him around the other side of a particularly fragrant Dumpster, his arms crossed and his head dipped to his jeweled chest. The bonewhite light from his lone eye illuminated his mottled, scarred hide. Dredda held a cup of glug out to him. “It gets better when you're drunk, I promise.”

Angor neither moved nor spoke.

_Okay, change tack._

She sipped her own glug and leaned on the wall beside him. “I don't know exactly what's going on in your head, but I imagine it has something to do with how out of place you feel.” She sipped glug. “If anybody knows what it's like to not feel like you belong anywhere, it's a changeling. S--”

Angor scoffed. “You know _nothing_ of me, _changeling._ ” His voice ground against itself like a fault line.

“I know that you did some bad things. Because you had bad things done to you. I know that somewhere along the way you figured out just how big of an asshole you were being, and you decided to make it right. And now you're doing good things.”

Angor glared at the green-skinned changeling, sipping her glug, awash in her own sense of false wisdom and serenity. The annoying Elder, her mate, was rubbing off on her.

“Deep down, you think you may not ever be able to make it all right, because there's so much bad. You hurt-- killed-- so many people, and the people you have to be around every day remind you ever day of how badly you treated them, whether they do it on purpose or not. And it kills you inside. It _kills_ you, because you're trying _so hard_ to do good, and deep down you realize it may never be enough. So you resent yourself for even trying, for keeping on chewing this unchewable bone. You don't know why you're doing it, but you don't know why you can't quit either.”

He rolled his eye, irritation gusting through him. “As... _illuminating_ as this glimpse into your psyche has been, _changeling,_ I told you. You know _nothing.”_ He lay a hand over his chest. It was cool. Cool and dim and silent in there. “I can't feel bad about what I did. Because I can't feel _anything._ My soul is gone forever. Lady Morgana couldn't even call it back when she resurrected me.”

The changeling sipped glug and regarded him with inscrutable yellow eyes. Angor held her gaze for as long as it took her to look away, which was longer than he liked. “Yeah, that'd make for a hard day,” she said.

Like a striking snake he snatched the cup of glug out of her hand and pitched it at the opposite wall of the alley. It hit and shattered into smaller pieces than the first one had. “ _A hard day?!”_ He bellowed, hands curling into fists. “I came to her seeking help in my darkest hour. My entire _tribe_ was _massacred_ and I was alone, with _nothing_ but my flesh and my spirit! I gave of one, and she _took_ the other! And _cursed_ me with _millennia of bondage,_ all in the name of a cause she _knew_ to be a failing one! And finally, when my soul-- when freedom-- floated right before my eyes, the Trollhunter _took it away!”_

The changeling sipped glug.

“I care not about good or bad, changeling, because both sides have _never_ been on mine!” He hammered his fist into the Dumpster. It skidded backward toward the mouth of the alley with a grinding shriek of metal on asphalt. The changeling glanced over his shoulder, her ears perked toward the sounds of fleshbag voices. Their owners staggered drunkenly past the alley, leaning heavily on each other. She refocused on him.

“But...you _are_ free, are you not?”

Whitehot anger lit up Angor's skull. He moved close to the changeling, inches from her, towering over her. “Go back inside, _Impure. Now,”_ he rumbled.

The changeling sipped her glug, her yellow eyes flashing. Angor snarled a grin. _Got her_.

“Answer me one question first,” she said, her voice level and calm. “What does freedom mean to you?”

Angor stepped back, his eyebrows arching up his face. “What?”

“What does fre--”

“I _heard_ you!”

“Answer that, and I'll leave you alone.”

Angor opened his mouth. Closed it. Bared his teeth. Bafflement had doused his anger; now his head swum. “I...”

A motorcar roared by the alley, the fleshbags inside whooping high-pitched warcries. The changeling sipped the last of her glug and tossed the earthen cup into the Dumpster.

“I'm not free,” he finally said, because that was the only thought he could snag.

“You're not beholden to Morgana anymore. You're not locked in battle with the Trollhunter anymore. No one wants you dead; you have no more revenge to seek. You've settled all your scores. You said yourself; you're not on any side but your own. Hell, you're not even beholden to your own _soul_ anymore.” She opened her arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “Angor, you are _eminently_ free.”

His confusion deepened into consternation.

“You can leave. Walk away from this place. Do _whatever_ you want to do. Find a new tribe. Kill at will. Eat as many humans as you like. Finish what you started when you came to Morgana, and protect the tribe that's opening its arms to you.”

Angor's knees unhinged and he slid slowly down the side of the Dumpster until he sat on the icy-oil-puddled asphalt. He screwed his eye shut and clutched his head, willing it to stop whirling. “None of it matters,” he groaned. “My soul is gone. I'm... empty inside, and I'll never be the same again. I could kill every day for the rest of my life, or spend the rest of my life in service to a tribe, but it won't fill this...this _pit_ in me.” he struck his chest with a fist. “I can't hate the people I kill or love the tribe I serve. I can't...don't you _understand,_ changeling? I can't _ever_ be like I was.”

“Nobody ever _is_ after they suffer something monstrous,” the changeling said, her voice softening. She squatted in front of him and the warmth in her smile made him want to haul back and knock her teeth down her throat. “Plus, I'm not entirely convinced your soul is gone forever.”

“Huh?”

“In my experience, once's soul is nourished when one nourishes other souls. I know _I_ feel all warm and wiggly inside when I do something that's good for other people. Even better: when it's good for other people _and_ me. Like helping get Arcadia back on its feet. That could be _your_ home too, you know.”

Angor stared at her.

“You're free, Angor. The only decision you have to make is what you'll use your freedom to accomplish.” she hooked a thumb back toward Trollmarket. “I know some people who could help you figure it out. And some souls you could help nourish.”

Angor's mind slowly began to settle. He felt himself standing at the edge of a great water of unknown depth and distance, the full moon beaming a stripe of its own light from the horizon all the way to where the gentle tiny waves broke over his toes: a beckoningto a destiny that was not simply _oncoming_ ; one he could _hold_ and _shape._ Across the water lay moonlight and things he'd never had before. Behind him were things he'd never have again.

 

Across the water lay moonlight and things he'd never had before. Behind him were things he'd never have again.

The changeling stood and opened a hand to him. “Yours too, I bet.”

Angor blinked and gripped her hand.

 


End file.
